Bless the Broken Road
by earwig
Summary: Julian can't believe he's dating the head cheerleader. Set during/after 6.16.


TITLE: Bless the Broken Road  
AUTHOR: earwig  
PAIRING: Brooke/Julian  
RATING: G  
SUMMARY: Julian can't believe he's dating the head cheerleader.

SPOILERS: Set immediately after 6x16.  
DISCLAIMER: The characters of the One Tree Hill belong to their owner. No copyright infringement intended.  
AUTHOR'S NOTE: Thanks to leobrat for reading this first.

Julian wasn't cool in high school.

He knows this. He's made peace with it. Most of the time, he even thinks he's moved on.

He knows, no matter what his father says, that he's good at what he does. That this, making movies, was what he is meant to do.

He knows that when people look at him, they don't see a skinny math geek with bad hair that got his lunch money stolen every day of junior high school, the kid that in high school couldn't get a date, let alone a date with the head cheerleader.

And yet, a part of him, still can't believe that he's doing just that.

Dating the head cheerleader.

He knows that she's more than that, he's fascinated and attracted and captivated by all the other parts of her, too; the part that opens her home to an orphaned teenager, the part of her that is a savvy business woman, the part that is a caring friend.

He's attracted to her brain and her body, her talent and her heart. He's just flat out attracted to her, in every way he can imagine, and some that he probably hasn't yet.

In fact, there was no romantic cliché that he hasn't thought of her in terms of, and that scares him shitless.

He's never fallen for a girl so fast, never, not even when he was in high school and he'd fallen for a different unattainable girl every other week.

But maybe, just maybe, what scares him the most is that she is attainable.

That she's here, with him, that this time the girl is standing right in front of him, wanting him back, and that he'll only have himself to blame if he fucks it up.

He really doesn't want to fuck it up.

So when he does, accidentally pressing all of Brooke's buttons about who she'd been in high school, about what she'd done, he knows that he has to tell her.

Has to tell her what he was, what he's become.

He has to make her understand that he knows she's not who she was in high school, because he's not either.

Has to make her understand that who they are is more important than who they've been.

He just has to make her understand.

So he digs his own yearbook out of the bottom of a drawer, and takes it with him to the diner, hoping that she'll be sitting inside. Hoping that he hasn't fucked this up beyond repair, that he'll be able to convince her to listen to what he has to say.

When he spots her through the window, he gives a mental sigh of relief and steels himself for what he's about to do.

He knows he has to do this, has to share his past with hers, to try to make her see how different their lives back then were, but a part of him, the part that's still the skinny math geek that the head cheerleader never noticed except to copy off of, is terrified that this will send her running in the opposite direction.

That maybe he hasn't changed as much as he thought he had.

He shakes his head.

He's not that boy, and she's not that girl, and really, that's the whole point.

He opens the door and steps inside.

He sits down across from her, from the girl of his past and present dreams, and explains.

He can only hope it's enough.

And then it is, and she's smiling across the table at him with tears in her eyes, and he knows there are tears in his own, and it doesn't matter that his voice cracked while he was laying himself bare before her in a way that it hadn't since high school.

He reaches across the table and takes her hand, twining their fingers together, her skin soft to his touch.

He's here with the girl that was nearly impossible to find, the girl that he already thinks is the one, and she's looking back at him like she thinks the same.

When she looks at him like that, he knows that he'd be that geek again a thousand times over, if every time he'd end up sitting here with her.

The head cheerleader and the math geek.

The fashion designer and the movie producer.

Brooke and Julian.


End file.
